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Can SpinRite low-level format my IDE, EIDE, or SCSI drive?

April 26, 2017drive EIDE format IDE low-level SCSI SpinRite

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Can SpinRite low-level format my IDE, EIDE, or SCSI drive?

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No software of any sort can truly low-level format today’s modern drives. The ability to low-level format hard drives was lost back in the early 1990’s when disc surfaces began incorporating factory written “embedded servo data”. If you have a very old drive that can truly be low-level reformatted, SpinRite v5.0 will do that for you (which all v6.0 owners are welcome to download and run anytime). But this is only possible on very old non-servo based MFM and RLL drives with capacities up to a few hundred megabytes.